Perception & Attribution

What is Perception?

A person's mental image of the world. What you think
IS (as opposed to "should be").

The Perceptual Process

Two key elements: attention and organization.

The Old Woman/Young Woman Illusion.

Attention

In any situation we only pay attention to a few things. Your
mind unconsciously filters out most of what is going on around
you. At some level, you mind is probably aware of a lot of
things. Think about the people sitting next to you in a class.
What are they wearing? What movements are they making (are they
breathing?)? What do all the chairs look like? What's on the
walls? What sounds are coming from outside? You're not really
aware of all those things. Consider your own body. Are you aware
of your pulse, breathing, feel of the chair under you, the
feeling of your clothes on your body?

How come my dog doesn't wake up if I start petting her while
she's asleep, but if a car drives into the driveway she goes from
sleeping to barking in less than a second? Her mind is filtering
things.

context: at meal time, every one of my movements triggers
a huge reaction in the dogs

training:

police trained to spot certain things in cars or
in people's behavior

psychologists wait for certain comments, or signs
of certain problems

doctors run through whole laundry list of
deviations from health state

Organization

Even when you do become aware of these things, there is
considerable pre-processing that is done by brain before it
reaches your consciousness. If you are watching a professor in
class, do you see him or her raising and lowering his arm in
front of the blackboard, or do you see him writing on the
blackboard? We see the world in terms of meaningful, functional
units, not simple movements. When my mouth is moving and sounds
are coming out, I am speaking.

Animal perception is not like computer/machine perception.
There is filtering and meaning all the way down to the simplest
level. It is not like the eye is a video camera, and the brain
then makes sense of the images. Instead, even the eye filters
things.

Perception is affected by knowledge -- by what the brain
already knows. Knowledge is itself organized. For example,
similar things are stored together.

The mind also creates schemas, frames and scripts. After going
to enough restaurants, you learn the pattern of how things go:

(i) stop just the door and wait for someone to greet you

(ii) you tell them how many in your party

(iii) may be asked if smoking or non-smoking

(iv) follow person to table

(v) if fancy restaurant allow waiter to pull out seat for
your, push it back in, lay napkin on lap . Etc.

All situations have behavioral norms that get internalized by
participants so that they know what to expect. This is turn
determines what they find to be unusual or special. For example,
a person screaming and rolling on the floor is not a big deal in
a mental ward, but it would be highly noticeable in a classroom.

It's not just behavior its presence and absence of features:
types of clothing, such as uniforms on waitresses in cocktail
bars, color of walls in schools, size of hallways, sliding doors
to porches, swinging doors for kitchens etc.

Some schemas are cultural -- you learn them from others, from
books, TV, institutions. Others are experiential -- from mundane,
what happens at restaurants, to how to have a romantic
relationship.

Perceptual Distortions

The fact that mind stores information in schemas which in turn
are built from experience means that you can comprehend and
recall situations extremely well. For example, one glance at a
new restaurant and you understand the whole layout, because you
understand restaurants in general. Another example is language
acquisition by children.

But schemas are also a source of errors, in particular false
recalls of usual events and omission of unusual ones. Two
interesting papers you can read:

Shweder, R.A. and R.G. D'Andrade. 1980. "The
Systematic Distortion Hypothesis." New
Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral
Sciences. 4:37-58.

Schemas also facilitate and hinder learning. For example,
experiments show that people have trouble memorizing who is
friends with whom in a group unless the friendships are
transitive: that is, if A is friends with B, and B is friends
with C, then it is also true that A is friends with C.

Stereotypes are a kind of schema that often have problematic
consequences in terms of justice. In the past women were seen as
too flighty and flaky to be entrusted with voting, so they were
not allowed to vote. Blacks are often seen as dumb, violent and
lazy. Men are often seen as aggressive, competitive and sexual
predators. The consequences of these stereotypes, besides the
obvious, is that stories about individuals are often judged as
true simply because they fit preconceptions about the class. For
example, it is easy for people to believe that a crime was caused
by a black man. Similarly, accusations of sexual harassment tend
to stick even without evidence because people believe that
"men are like that".

Another interesting phenomenon is the halo effect.
This is where one characteristic of something or someone affects
perception of all the other characteristics. For example, if
medical doctors are often asked their opinion about financial
matters. Consumers often buy a product because it is by a company
that makes other products they like.

A curious characteristic of human thinking processes is projection.
This is where you perceive others in ways that really reflect
yourself. For example, dishonest people tend to see dishonesty in
others.

Attribution

Attribution refers to how people in situations like the
workplace construct explanations of other people's behavior.
People are not exactly rocket scientists: these explanations can
be highly simplified and strongly biased. What is interesting and
helpful is that people's biases tend to be systematic and
predictable.

For example, people tend to overestimate personal/individual
causes (abilities, motives, morals) and tend to underestimate
situational causes, like nature of the job, compensation system,
the economy, luck, the percentage of the population who are
young. For example, people attribute the state of the economy to
the President. But scientific work on the topic suggests that
Presidents have little effect on the economies during their
tenure (but can have big effects on the economy years later).

Another kind of bias occurs with the nature of a person's
participation in a situation, and how it comes out. For example,
if a student gets an A on a test, the student thinks it was
because he or she is so smart. But if they get an F, it's because
the teacher is a jerk, or the book is lousy, or some other
reason. In general, people seem to think this way:

if my outcome is good (I become president of company),
I'm responsible for it (my hard work, my brains)

Another basic principle is that people tend to attribute
motives to people's behavior. So when people don't behave as you
expect them to, you think they are doing it on purpose (usually,
just to annoy you). In other words, people tend to assume a
common understanding of a situation, but different motives and
interests. They also tend to assume that other people do
everything consciously: no oversight is truly an oversight, no
inconsiderate action was just thoughtless.